Clemson students get help to keep scholarships

Program aims to ease shock from high school to college

Oct. 26, 2013

The Academic Success Center on the Clemson University campus has helped students adjust to the transition from high school to college so they don't fall behind in their coursework and jeopardize their scholarships. / Heidi Heilbrunn / Staff

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Even taking Advanced Placement courses, which offer college credit, she barely cracked a book outside of class, she says.

The graduate of J.L. Mann Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology came face to face with reality when she got to Clemson University. The amount of effort it takes to cut it in college, she discovered, “doesn’t compare” to the way things were in high school.

Her choice: Either get with the program in a hurry and keep up a B average or face losing her $5,000-a-year LIFE Scholarship.

“My freshman year, when I didn’t really know what to expect, I was kind of in danger of it,” the junior food science and nutrition major said. “But I’ve kind of figured it out by now.”

She had some help in getting on track at place called the Academic Success Center.

It’s a $13 million facility the university built to house a program designed primarily to help students hold on to those scholarships that for the majority of Clemson students from South Carolina amounts to a ticket to a future as a college graduate.

In an era of dwindling state funding and rising tuition, those scholarships are vital to their future — and Clemson’s.

One in three Clemson students gets help at the Academic Success Center, according to director Elaine Richardson.

Similarly, at Greenville Technical College, about 30 percent of the school’s 13,450 students take “developmental” courses, which offer no college credit, just to get up to college level, said Lenna Young, vice president of academic affairs.

“True college academic work is tough. There is absolutely no other way around it,” she said.

Nearly half — 48 percent — of the students who enroll in an associate’s degree program at Greenville Tech come back for a second year, according to her figures.

Only two out of 10 Greenville Tech students — 21 percent — get their LIFE Scholarship renewed for a second year, according to the state Commission on Higher Education.

Those figures include not only students fresh out of high school but those who have decided to go back to school after a few years, Young said. The average age of Greenville Tech students is 27, she said.

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These numbers may seem to point a finger at the K-12 education system as falling short in preparing high school graduates for college.

That may be an oversimplification of the issue, however, said Lorin Anderson, a professor emeritus of education from the University of South Carolina.

He worked with USC-Upstate on a study that explored the difficulties of the transition from high school to college.

“What we found was that there were gaps between the expectations at the two levels,” he said. “So it really wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was really a lack of coordination, or a lack of understanding.”

High school students are used to much more supervision from their teachers than they get in college, he said.

For example, in high school, an English teacher might set three or four deadlines for various phases of writing a research paper and stretch the process out over several months, he said. In freshman English in college, they’re likely to have to write three or four times as many research papers in the same time period, and with little or no support from their professor, he said.

“The colleges aren’t going to change,” Anderson said, “so what we need to do is to help the high school teachers understand the difference in demands that are being placed on their kids.”

One solution, he says, is to expand the number of programs such as Greenville Tech Charter High, which offers high school students an opportunity to earn dual college and high school credit in courses taught by college instructors.

Greenville Tech is already making some efforts in that direction, in addition to supporting three charter schools in the county, said Young.

The school offers “early college” programs in some Greenville County high schools and career centers.

“Maybe that’s why we aren’t looking at the high schools as being the problem. We’re kind of in there with them,” she said.

But those courses aren’t offered in all the high schools, only the ones that ask, she said.

Greenville County Schools doesn’t follow up on how its alumni do once they get into college, but 90 percent of the most recent graduates said in a survey that they planned to go to college, with two-thirds of them aiming for a four-year college, according to spokesman Oby Lyles.

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Dee Dee Washington, associate superintendent for academics at Greenville County Schools, said one reason graduates often struggle when they get to college is because they chose not to take the rigorous courses they could have taken in high school.

“Students really kind of craft their own path through high school,” she said.

The state requires 24 units for a high school diploma, but some students shy away from the tougher courses in hopes of keeping their GPA up. They must rank in the top 30 percent of their class to qualify for a LIFE Scholarship.

Some parents take the opposite approach with their kids.

“For example, we don’t require probability and statistics in math,” Washington said. “But I knew my daughter is a pre-med major so I made sure she took probability and statistics.”

“So as a parent I just made sure that she was not only taking higher-level courses, she was taking the most rigorous courses available. And then I had to teach her how to study because she was also a student who really didn’t necessarily have to study.”

Also, many high school students — district officials aren’t able to say how many — reach their senior year with most of their core courses and credits out of the way, so they opt for early dismissal rather than take a full course load, Washington said.

“When students are getting close to meeting that 24-credit requirement, then we are really kind of limited on how much we can force them to continue to take courses and to take those more rigorous courses,” Washington said. “That’s certainly where we would be dependent on the guidance of parents.”

Clemson recognized the need for a program to help students keep their grades up and retain their scholarships more than a decade ago.

The program that’s now the Academic Success Center started as a pilot in 2001, right as the lottery-funded scholarship program was about to began.

Then the recession hit, and state funding of public colleges and universities fell from $859 million in 2008 to $457 million in 2012, according to the state Commission on Higher Education. Funding for higher education as a percentage of the state budget fell from 14 percent in 2001 to 6.5 percent in 2012, according to CHE.

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Yet college enrollment in the state has nearly doubled over the past quarter-century, from 85,116 in 1985 to 164,931 in 2011-12, according to CHE. That's the equivalent of adding four institutions the size of the University of South Carolina, while facing a 50 percent reduction in state support, adjusted for inflation, the CHE said.

With state support going down, student costs went up.

Tuition and fees for full-time state residents at Clemson rose by 19.5 percent between the 2008-09 academic year and 2012-13, from $10,608 to $12,674, according to CHE. It had jumped by 53 percent the five years prior to that, from $6,934 in 2003-04, CHE figures show. This year it’s $13,054.

The numbers for USC are similar. Costs there were up 18.7 percent over five years to $10,488, and 53 percent over the previous five, according to the CHE.

The lottery-funded scholarships, worth $294 million to all of the state institutions and $50.7 million to Clemson in 2011-12, became all the more important in keeping college within reach for students who also were loading themselves down with increasing levels of student loan debt to make up the difference.

Clemson’s Academic Success Center hires students who have previously taken a course and made an A in it to offer supplemental instruction. They go to class with the students who need help so they know exactly what went on in each class. Then they work with the students in small groups to help them understand what went over their head and to help organize the material they’re learning.

Tutoring is available in more than 100 courses.

The center also offers programs designed to help students improve their academic skills, such as note-taking and managing study time. In addition, special courses are available to help students who are on academic probation.